Cognition in Aging and Age-Related Disease

Cognitive Declines with Healthy Aging

With an increasing average age of humans, brain aging, and age-related diseases are drawing increasing attention from basic research and clinical research. Aging has diverse effects on cognitive function. Cognitive decline is not an inevitable consequence of advancing age. For many people, aging is associated with relatively slight cognitive declines. On the one hand, memory declines significantly with age but does not prevent the performance of daily activities (mild cognitive impairment). On the other hand, aging is also associated with severe cognitive deficits that impede the ability to live independently.

Aging is known to affect various aspects of cognitive function. There are three core deficits proposed to explain the pattern of age-related declines: changes in sensory perception, inhibitory ability, and changes in processing speed. Previous studies confirmed that age-related deficits in fluid intelligence, processing speed, executive function, and working memory were related to older adults' performance in many fields.

Fig.1 Trajectories of healthy and unhealthy aging. (Franceschi, 2018)

• Sensory Deficits

The cognitive changes with aging and age-related disease are attributed to changes in sensation, such as deficits in vision and hearing. Therefore, it is plausible that age-related deficits on many cognitive tasks stem from reductions in sensory processing.

• Changes in Inhibitory Ability

Cognitive deficits of older adults are associated with the inability to ignore irrelevant information in the environment. The study indicates that inhibitory deficits can occur on a range of tasks requiring the ability to attend to environmental information selectively or inhibit a strong response. However, inhibitory deficits impair performance not only on tasks that assess inhibitory ability but also on assessments of working memory capacity.

• Speed of Processing

Older adults have a slow processing speed, which is noted not only at the motor level but also at a cognitive level. This additional slowing results is due to that the increased cognitive processing before the appropriate action can be selected. Thus, a slower processing speed leads to a reduced ability to store information.

Network-Based Biomarkers for Age-Related Diseases

Some molecular mechanisms cause aging in many ARDs/GSs, particularly frailty and sarcopenia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), cancer, and Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. The organization of brain networks during aging or with age-related diseases shifts towards matched random networks in topology. It shows changes in modular organization and regional centrality at specific brain regions. In addition, some changes in brain network organization have been demonstrated to be significantly correlated to clinical scores of age-related diseases, which implies that metrics of brain networks are potentially used as biomarkers.

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References

1. Franceschi, C.; et al. The continuum of aging and age-related diseases: common mechanisms but different rates. Frontiers in medicine. 2018, 5, 61.